Sunday, December 10, 2006

Move over silicon, there's new transistor material in town

According to this article, the #1 transistor material of the last few decades, silicon, will soon hit a wall in terms of size and performance. Fortunately for us, technology lovers, several replacement materials are currently under development all around the globe.

One such material is indium gallium arsenide, or InGaAs, a material in which electrons travel many times faster than in silicon. MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) recently demonstrated InGaAs-fabricated transistors that can carry 2.5 times more current than the latest silicon devices. The transistor was only 60 nanometers, or billionths of a meter long.